Diana Taylor Speaks on "Archiving the 'Thing'"

April 1, 2015

Join us for this special presentation with Dr. Diana Taylor, a University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, as she presents in the final event in the Gale Memorial Lecture Series 2014-15. For reference, see the event flyer. The event is co-sponsored by the UNM Department of Art and Art History, Art & Ecology program, and the Latin American & Iberian Institute.

In this lecture on "Archiving the 'Thing,'" Taylor refers to "Bom Retiro 958 metros," a performance by Brazil's theatre company, Teatro da Vertigem, which leads us on a walk through São Paulo's phantasmagoric world of things--things in a state of consumer glory, in use, in disuse, and in various stages of disintegration. This experiential piece challenges many of our assumptions about the desire to accumulate, transform, archive, and collect 'things' as we move through the underside of this immigrant neighborhood.

Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War', Duke U.P., 1997, and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003) which won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004). The Archive and the Repertoire has been translated into Portuguese by Eliana Lourenç o de Lima Reis (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 2012) and Spanish by Anabelle Contreras (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2014.) Her most recent book, PERFORMANCE, is forthcoming with Duke U.P. Taylor is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2013-14. Currently, she serves as Second Vice President of the MLA to assume the presidency in 2017. Diana Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers and Henry Luce Foundations.